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Editor’s Note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Dykes is the sole founder of Front Porch Pantry and that all meals are shipped refrigerated, not frozen.
Michaelann Dykes' passions had always been cooking and entertaining. She enjoyed making meals, such as pork tenderloin, chili-glazed salmon or chicken spaghetti, a family favorite.
As her career as a sales executive at an apparel company began to wind down, her family and friends encouraged her to turn those passions into a business.
"Well, everybody likes to come eat my food at my house, but I don't know if they're going to buy it,” she recalled telling them.
Ten years later, people buy it, to the tune of many thousands of meals each year. Front Porch Pantry, the company she founded in 2016, today ships those family favorites and other meals from Farmers Branch to all over Texas and the surrounding states, precooked and ready to heat and eat.
Online customers are presented with the next week’s menu of meals, soups and desserts, make their selections, and have them delivered the following week. Those meals, albeit the ones currently being shipped to online customers, not the menu currently shown online, are also available from a storefront attached to the company’s Farmers Branch headquarters.
“A lot of the recipes are still the same. The packaging is significantly different,” Dykes said.
When Front Porch Pantry began in March 2016, it was in a tiny commercial kitchen in the back of Sigel’s Fine Wines & Great Spirits, an Addison branch of a local liquor store chain where Dykes leased space. Today FPP takes orders through its website, but in those early days, it took orders by email. Each week, FPP sent out an email newsletter laying out its menu for the next week, and customers simply wrote back if they chose to buy anything from it.
But in October 2016, Sigel’s went bankrupt, so FPP briefly operated out of a part of a Dallas catering kitchen Dykes leased from a friend. With orders growing, FPP’s main kitchen manager wondered how the business would keep up in such cramped quarters, Dykes said.
Then, in 2017, FPP landed a location of its own in a former gluten-free bakery in Carrollton. This time, the same manager wondered how the company would fill all the new space.
But business was booming.
By late 2019, FPP had opened its first retail storefront to sell meals in person at its Carrollton headquarters and was partnering with insurance provider Blue Cross Blue Shield on a community health initiative aimed at making nutritious, affordable food available in food deserts, said Landen Moody, head of growth at FPP.
“Business exploded,” Dykes said. “We had two shifts at that [Carrollton] location, and we started realizing that we needed another location.”
When a 26,000-square-foot facility, once a Cadillac auto detailing center owned by Clay Cooley, became available on McEwen Road in Farmers Branch that year, the team jumped at the opportunity, Dykes said.
“We had architects come and see what we could do, because we had a lot of building to do … it was just a shell of a building.” Despite supply chain and contractor availability issues stemming from the pandemic, FPP moved into its current location in Farmers Branch in September 2021. “And from there, we have just filled every single nook and cranny,” she said.
One of those nooks is occupied by the company’s retail storefront, moved along with the rest of its business from its former location in Carrollton to its current one in Farmers Branch. With the racks of carefully arranged towels, painted plates, wooden utensils, copper pots and pans, and dry foodstuffs at one end of the store, and the test kitchen – complete with massive midnight-blue gas stove – behind the register at the other end, the shop manages to appear almost more domestic than commercial. Whether intentional on the part of FPP or not, the mood is one of a spacious, upscale pantry.
But the commercial refrigerators lining the sides of the shop form the main attraction. Inside lie stacks of sealed trays, each containing a heat-and-eat meal sized for two people. A couple of other fridges contain add-on items such as soups and desserts. The storefront carries meals from that week’s menu, the same meals being shipped to online customers who ordered them the week before. Online customers, meanwhile, are choosing from the following week’s menu.
This is one of the most significant ways Front Porch Pantry differs from its competitors in meal delivery, Dykes said: its business model is not focused on subscriptions.
“Our main focus is à la carte: order what you want … when you want it … most of our competitors require you to do at least two weeks in a subscription,” Dykes said.
That is a selling point, customer Linda Bambina said: “The problem with those [other meal delivery services] is … you're signing up, and until you tell them ‘No, stop, I don’t want it this month,’ or week, or whatever, then it comes …. and I have no interest in just having it come, come, come, and come, and come.”
Instead, FPP’s business relies on repeat customers, Dykes said. “88% of them come back and order again … as we grow, naturally, from a data standpoint, that number should go down,” but the fact that it hasn’t means that even as the company adds new customers, about the same number of older customers continue to buy meals, she said.
Bambina, for instance, said she has been a regular customer for two years.
“To this day, word of mouth is a core component of how we consider growth, and maintaining that loyalty is very important to us,” Moody said.
While online orders destined for outside DFW are shipped through major shipping services, online orders within the Metroplex are delivered, refrigerated, by FPP’s own drivers. Because some local customers have ordered so regularly for so long, Dykes said, their drivers “know their grandkids. They know their children … and some [customers] just start leaving the back door open for them and they go in and put the Front Porch Pantry in the refrigerator.”
It’s hard to imagine closer involvement in a community than direct access to its refrigerators, Front Porch Pantry also makes an impact by donating roughly 15,000 meals per year to local charities, as many as 30,000 portions, given that each meal is sized for two people, mainly Dayspring Family Church Food Pantry in Irving, Moody wrote in an email.
“At least 60% of the food we distribute is from Front Porch Pantry,” said Pastor Sonjia Dickerson of Dayspring Family Church.
“The demand for these meals has been great, because we’re seeing, on the surface, the economy looks pretty decent, but there's a population that kind of goes beneath the radar, and those are the kind of people that we serve,” said Bishop Kevin Dickerson, Sonjia’s husband and the senior pastor of Dayspring Family Church.
That the meals are already cooked lifts an additional burden off of many of the meals’ recipients, Elnora Overton, also of Dayspring, said. Many recipients of the donated meals are elderly or recovering from medical procedures and cannot cook for themselves. “It’s a blessing to them to be able to receive hot, nutritious meals,” Overton said.
“I believe that Front Porch is a prototype for other companies,” Sonjia said, referring to the company’s charitable giving. “They are setting the bar high.”
Charity aside, one customer said she preferred FPP to other meal delivery options because it is a local business. “One of the reasons I stay with them is because they are a Farmers Branch business, and I try to keep things as local as possible and bring money back into our community … There's all those meal kit things that are national that you can do, but I feel very happy going with [FPP] with them being local,” said Kelly Harrod.
Front Porch Pantry continues to grow, to the point that supplying it has become a competitive prospect. “[Big suppliers are] all wanting the potato business … they’re fighting over the green bean business,” Dykes said.
“We’ve expanded to four states, and we will expand,” she said, “but quality is our number one priority, and we won’t ever expand beyond what we can succeed [in delivering] at 100% quality.”
Still, Dykes’ aim is the same as it was before she even began the business. “Our mission is to make sure that we answer that question: ‘What’s for dinner?’” she said.
For more information, visit Front Porch Pantry's website.
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